All Saints Day
November 1, 2015

Click here to listen to this homily (mp3 file)

      A number of different thoughts crowded into my mind as I sat down to prepare a homily for this great feast of All Saints, one of my absolute favorites.

     Strange as it might seem, I found myself thinking of the controversial, hotly contested, recently concluded – but inconclusively concluded – Roman Synod. Why?  Well, the Synod was about the family and All Saints Day is about family, too.  All Saints Day celebrates the great family of those who, while they were here, lived and loved, laughed and cried, worked and worried, sinned and repented – all the while struggling to be true to the gospel by being among the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers.

     But that family is not just those who have gone before us. It includes us. We are part of the great family we call the Communion of Saints.  We may not always feel very saintly, and our families, messy as they can be at times, may not look all that saintly, but the fact remains: we are part of the Communion of Saints, graced by God, called to glory.  So this feast is about family, the whole family of God. And today we take heart knowing that those in the family who are already with God know our struggles, sympathize with our failings, and smile on our weaknesses even as they surround us with their love and prayers and cheer us on!

     So maybe it’s not so strange that, in thinking about All Saints Day, I thought about the Synod and about the family issues it tried to address and, in some ways, failed to address.  For all its lacks, I am grateful that the Synod happened, and even for the way it happened.  Grateful that the bishops, in trying to deal with the challenges of today’s families, showed themselves to be very much a family – with all the things that go with family: love, resentment, support, contention, agreement, division, factions, frictions, anger, forgiveness, hostility, compromise. All those were in evidence at the Synod which seems very real to me and, in my better moments - when I’m not chafing at what seemed like a certain deafness and obtuseness – in my better moments I find myself thanking God that I am part of this family, this earthly and oh, so earthy, branch of the Communion of Saints!  I hope you thank God, too!

     There were other thoughts that came to mind as I prepared this homily, too. I thought about the people Pope Francis likes to call “everyday saints.”  In one of his delightful, off-the-cuff weekday homilies, he talked about these everyday saints.  “They’re not just about appearances,” he said. “They don’t put on faith as if it were makeup that washes away when the rain falls; no, they live God’s love in the midst of struggles. They are the sick who offer their suffering for the Church and for others, the elderly who pray for the rest of us, the many moms and dads who keep their families going day after day, raising their children, working, facing problems, but always with hope in Jesus.”  He concluded by saying, “the fact that they make mistakes and sin does not destroy their witness because we are all sinners, we are all weak. But if we put our hope in Jesus we are on our way to becoming saints.” It’s true!

     And those words of Pope Francis brought to mind other words of his: his remarkable address in the Congress a few weeks ago when he held up as models for our lawmakers and for every one of us four American ‘saints’ – none of them canonized by the Church but each embodying what sainthood is all about and what this feast of All Saints is all about. You remember who they were: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. I want to zero in on Thomas Merton since this is the 100th anniversary of his birth.

     Thomas Merton was a poet, an intellectual, a social activist-turned-Trappist-monk, and an immensely influential figure in mid-20th century America. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain was an unlikely bestseller that changed a lot of lives. There’s a passage in that book that’s pertinent to today’s feast. Merton tells of a conversation he had with a friend shortly after his conversion to Catholicism. He told his friend that he all he wanted in life was to be a good Catholic. His friend told him, “What you should say is that you want to be a saint.”  Merton replied that that struck him as a little weird. “How do you expect me to become a saint?” he asked. And the friend told him, “By wanting to. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. That’s because God wants you to be a saint and all you have to do is to want what God wants for you.”

     Now, I know this may sound a little simplistic, but Merton’s friend’s logic is iron-clad. If God created each of us to be saints (and God surely did), then doesn’t it follow that God will give us what we need to fulfill that destiny? So, I have a question for you on this feast of All Saints, my friends: do you want to be a saint?

     Merton found the idea “weird.” I think many of us do.  That’s because our idea of saint probably needs some tweaking. Forget plaster statues. Forget the pale, bloodless faces and modestly downcast eyes of holy cards and holy pictures; forget the furrowed brow, the frozen face, the perpetual seriousness. Forget life without laughs, life without joy.

     Forget all that and start, instead, with who you are: the unique and wonderful person God made you to be.  That’s the raw material of your sainthood.  Who you are.  No one else can be a saint in quite the same way as you can.  And don’t let your awareness of your shortcomings -- your warts and flaws, your sins and failings -- don’t let those things convince you that you’re way too human to be a saint, that too much has happened,  that sainthood may have been a possibility way back, but not now, that sainthood is for others, not for you.  That in itself would a sin, a denial of God’s power, God’s grace.

     Someone once said that there’s no saint without a past and no sinner without a future.  I like that.  There’s no saint without a past and no sinner without a future!  It’s true, my friends.  It’s true.  We all have a past, spotted though it may be, and we all have a future.  A glorious future beyond our imagining.

     As we celebrate today all the saints who have gone before us – our fellow members of the human family from all times and places, countless in number, who stumbled and fell along the way but who kept faith, kept letting God work wonders of grace in their lives, let us take courage knowing that we can do the same and get to where they’ve gotten.  Get to where God wants us to be. Get to be saints. We can, my friends. We must!

     Happy Feast Day!

     Father Michael G. Ryan